SEO Audit: 3 Analysis to Improve Performance of a Wedding Marketplace

I audited theknot.com as part of an SEO manager interview. The following points are my own observation so you may or may not find these points useful.

1. Optimize Speed

There are rooms to optimize speed both on desktop and mobile. It is difficult because there are different internet connections and devices with different software and hardware settings. On July 9, 2018 Google said, page speed is a ranking factor both for desktop and mobile searches. So we must dedicate resources to improve speed.

Here are some suggestions to improve speed

• Resource Hints

Resource Hints help the browser find the resources it will need, and download them ahead of time for better performance. theknot.com/marketplace require resources from the following third party origins and resource hints could be applied there to improve speed.

Here is The Guardian, a British daily newspaper is using resource hints to optimize its speed.

• CSS

CSS is key to performance and critical to rendering a page. By default, CSS is treated as a render blocking resource. According to my audit, there are rooms to optimize CSS.

Any CSS not needed to render the current view is effectively lazyloaded by the browser. We should take advantage of this feature by splitting the current CSS file into individual media queries. Please see the screenshot below for better understanding. Also, if possible we should move the CSS files to the main origin.

• JavaScript

JavaScript is an expensive resource and it is complex to maintain it. Here are a couple of suggestions to use it in a way to improve speed. Whenever possible the script should be loaded asynchronously. For instance the Optimizely script should use the asynchronous tag to improve speed.

Third party scripts are always expensive. This specific page theknot.com/marketplace is using around 50 third party scripts. We should talk to dev team to understand the importance of those scripts and if possible remove the unnecessary ones.

We should embed script directly via a tag or at least adding a preload tag. Please see the screenshot to understand better.

JavaScript is specifically expensive on mobile devices. Most of the traffic these days are coming from mobile devices and mobile internet speed is usually weak.

That’s why Google is adding new features to Chrome’s android version like automatically download articles for later reading, data saver and more recent rumor is Chrome for Android may start disabling JavaScript on 2G connections. theknot.com/marketplace should be better prepared for this.

Here is NPR better prepared with their text version of the site https://text.npr.org/. Chrome is suggesting to use the APIs like navigator.connection.saveData and navigator.connection.effectiveType to tap into users device settings and provide webpages based on that.

2. Optimize User Interface

We should offer an option like save your search without login as bestbuy.com to make the search experience better. We also should add text/SMS and email to easily share the search experience with partners, friends, parents, and relatives.

We could also offer features like browsing story as besbuy.com to personalize the search experience

Features like checking venue availability date, an option to text and email share the venue, signup using google credential API, helpful and critical review comparison table, more options to filter search and a clean UI would attract and engage more users than the competitors like weddingwire.com

3. Optimize Google Search Index

site:www.theknot.com/marketplace –inurl:https, this site operator reveals a number of HTTP pages are indexed by Google. We should investigate the sitemap and log files to find out the reasons.

site:*.theknot.com –inurl:https, this site operator displays pages from http://forums.theknot.com, http://global.theknot.com are being indexed by Google. We should make those pages secured and aesthetically elegant to attract more users.

Duplicate contents and faceted navigation issues need to be addressed.

site:theknot.com/marketplace –inurl:www, this site operator displays a number of unwanted pages indexed by Google. Steps are needed to prevent pages like this to be indexed.

SEO is sort of associated with everything we do on a website. Hopefully, the team at theknot.com would find some of these points useful to optimize their site for the search engines.

Lastly, here are a couple of the folks who are skilled at web performance optimization you may wanna follow them on Twitter.

Tim Kadlec: https://twitter.com/tkadlec

Patrick Meenan: https://twitter.com/patmeenan

Addy Osmani: https://twitter.com/addyosmani

Ryan Townsend: https://twitter.com/RyanTownsend

Katie Hempenius: https://twitter.com/katiehempenius

Harry Roberts: https://twitter.com/csswizardry

Henri Helvetica: https://twitter.com/HenriHelvetica

Andy Davies: https://twitter.com/AndyDavies

Lina Hansson: https://twitter.com/LinaCHansson